Paranoia Trailer

Paranoia

An entry-level employee at a powerful corporation finds himself occupying a corner office, but at a dangerous price: he must spy on his boss's old mentor to secure for him a multi-billion dollar advantage.

Now it feels almost quaint, like a throwback. You watch it and, despite all the au courant techno geekery on display, you feel like you’ve stepped into a time capsule. It’s a nice feeling at first. If only the movie were better.

Chris Nashawaty Entertainment Weekly

The only real reason Paranoia is even remotely worth watching is the chance to see Oldman and Ford go head-to-head like two vipers thrown into a potato sack.

Bill Zwecker Chicago Sun-Times

The actors do their best. The problem here is simply a formulaic screenplay and less-than-inspired direction.

Kyle Smith New York Post

This one is essentially “The Firm” with smartphones.

Liam Lacey The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

There’s a scene in a members-only club where Wyatt and Goddard meet, giving the two veteran actors the chance to go eyeball to eyeball for a couple of minutes of barbed dialogue. It almost makes the movie worth it.

Sean O’Connell Washington Post

There’s tension to be wrung from the premise, but Luketic is content to telegraph his movie’s juiciest twists, concentrating instead on applying a sleek visual sheen usually reserved for shampoo commercials.

Scott Bowles USA Today

It plays more like a "21 Jump Street," full of pretty people and a thumping soundtrack but offering little in the way of something to say.

Steven Rea Philadelphia Inquirer

Hemsworth, who is Gale Hawthorne in "The Hunger Games" and the brother of the Hemsworth who stars as "Thor", has maybe one arrow in his acting quiver - he can look engaged.

Connie Ogle Miami Herald

Paranoia has a promising foundation — betrayal, danger and corporate espionage are solid building blocks of suspense. But the movie turns out to be more exasperating than exciting.

Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune

There's nothing wrong with Paranoia that a stronger director, livelier leading actors and several hundred fewer narrative conveniences wouldn't cure.

Stephen Farber The Hollywood Reporter

The filmmakers may have hoped to make a timely commentary on the amorality in our executive suites, but they end up merely restating the obvious. Maybe the whole thing would have played better as a corporate comedy, the kind that Doris Day and Rock Hudson made some 50 years ago.

William Goss Film.com

Frankly, no one in this ensemble is done any favors by Jason Hall and Barry Levy’s screenplay, a “Duplicity” for dummies filled to the brim with double-crossing cliches.

Kimber Myers The Playlist

The bland, boring Paranoia does little to distinguish itself and isn’t good (or even enjoyably bad enough) to be passable even as Saturday afternoon cable fodder.

A.A. Dowd The A.V. Club

The film works only, if at all, as an unofficial Air Force One reunion, with Ford stopping just short of bellowing “Get off my jock!” during a pair of gritted-teeth encounters with Oldman. Some pleasures never go out of fashion.

It is as slow, slick and superficial as the director of “21″ and “Killers” can make it.

Betsy Sharkey Los Angeles Times

I'm not going to get into the acting, because there's not much of it, frankly. No one is embarrassingly bad; no one is exceptionally good.

David Lewis San Francisco Chronicle

A ho-hum thriller about corporate spying in the high-tech world, comes off as a lot more preposterous than paranoid, and it takes no more than a few frames for the eye rolling to commence.

Peter Sobczynski RogerEbert.com

Although presumably meant to be a modern-day version of the classic conspiracy thriller "The Conversation," Paranoia is so vapid that it plays like "Antitrust" sans the food allergies.

Peter Travers Rolling Stone

It galls me that Hollywood thinks we're shallow enough to swallow this swill. Or am I just being paranoid?

Steve Davis Austin Chronicle

You could drive an 18-wheeler through the substantial number of plot holes in Paranoia.

Ernest Hardy Village Voice

This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.

Nick Schager Time Out New York

The fact that Hemsworth is severely lacking in leading-man charisma also doesn’t help the pervasive overall incompetence of the film, which fixates on the perils and panic of our modern surveillance culture while itself proving to be borderline unwatchable.

Stephen Holden The New York Times

Mr. Oldman and Mr. Ford are the only actors in the film, directed by Robert Luketic (“Legally Blonde”), skillful enough to navigate the yards of jargon-packed boilerplate in Jason Hall and Barry L. Levy’s thudding screenplay.

Joe Neumaier New York Daily News

Paranoia’s twitchiness is like an actual twitch: it’s contrived and clunky, and you forget it in an instant.